Monday, January 25, 2010

Blood Queen has been very difficult for us. We weren't on our game on Wednesday, and put a halt to our attempts to give it a fresh go on Sunday, and our last attempt of the night was a sudden wipe with Blood Queen enraging and slaughtering us all at 0.8% health.

For us, as a ten-strict guild with limited gear upgrade access and fewer badges available (not to mention having to rotate players in a single instance limiting badges further per player), the enrage timer is our greatest foe. We can overcome and adapt to the mechanics, staying out of swarms and spreading out a bit while still staying in range of each other for aoe heals, but that enrage timer is killing us. What's further frustrating is that we (maybe) would've gotten the kill last night on that last attempt had a certain pair of players not been pacted (due to placement, melee and ranged), or they not decided to meet right on top of the resto druid (>.>) and kill her with the pact aura + damage splash, or that tree had decided to sacrifice her nourish cast (swiftmend/NS on cooldown) and moved away through the maze of other players, or the feral not decided to sacrifice that little bit of dps time to res her. And it still would've been close.

On the flip side, we get Festergut with a minute or more left on his enrage timer.

Is it the three-heals? I don't think it can be done currently with just two, especially with our lower health pools compared to those with 25-man gear. Is it the number of melee? Is it that we had no priest and had to use fortitude scrolls? Was it just poor luck on who got shadow swarm and lost dps time? Was it a hiccup in the bite rotations, or bite timers coinciding with (still unreliably timed) P2 phases? Is it bloodlust timing?

Was it all of these?

Either way, Blood Queen has earned Vortex's wrath, and to see the silver lining, it will be all the sweeter when we finally topple her (and I turn her into a stick figure).

Rawr.

On an unrelated note, I went on an insane leveling spree on my poor shaman alt (who is as old as the Turalyon server itself), taking her from 43 to 73 in the past weekend (Thurs - Sun, plus some time on Thursday of the previous week). The dust is blown off and poor Stardance has seen the light of day. I've slowed up her leveling to pull my husband's old pally along with her through the quests of Northrend :)

It IS twohealable, but, I think the reason we were able to 2heal it is the gear. With 10man gear, 3healing it has to be the best way to go, at least for the time being.

Were bites managed properly? The DPS boost that bites gives is such a huge part of this fight. Did people get back to her as soon as they could after clearing their debuff? Perhaps picking a better path for running off the Jaraxxus Flames might be a helpful thing to do, so that they don't have to move as far to get back to DPSing her?

Some early wipes were deaths to people standing in flames from the assumption that they didn't hurt much (about 600-1k damage per tick)... that was fixed when we commented on how quickly the ticks happened.

We had bites holding off for the last 5 seconds before they'd get MC'd. This caused problems with a sudden P2, as they'd have to either bite right as someone got damaged (thus killing them), or else they'd go insane, all around having fears shuffle people's positions... a number of our wipes were from this.

Is it recommended then to not wait on bites? Were we over-thinking the fight with too much micromanagement? heh.

I wish I could give you a glimpse on the 25 page long thread on our forums we have about this very thing - micromanaging the bites. It's been pretty stupid intensive, trying to figure it all out. But I think it would be best to bite as soon as possible. Break out of the fear asap (tremor, fear ward, whatever you have) and be prepared to snipe up any damage that has laid out.

The first bite set isn't an issue, but we found that the second fear coincides with a bite needing to happen. I'm not sure how much it was offset by our DPS (having one extra sped things up a good bit). I have a video sitting on my harddrive waiting for a song, and I'll uploaded asap so you can take a look if you'd like.

To avoid the fear/air gib with the longer bite timer in the 10 man you only need to have the very first bite person wait about 10 seconds before biting. Everyone else after that can bite immediately! That should prevent you from having the bites line up during an air phase.

We held our bloodlust until all 5 of the DPS had been bitten, for what it's worth.

Also...if you aren't using it, the glyph of rapid rejuv is pretty ownage for the 10 man version of this fight!

Yeah, I am planning on bringing along a couple types of glyphs for that tonight, to swap in the rapid rejuv. I am undecided as to whether to let it replace nourish (I used nourish a lot while raid healing around the rejuvs/WGs/occasional LB, while Swiftmend/NS were on CD) or WG (usually only hit 4-5 players at a time in the blood queen fight)... thinking to replace the WG glyph for her, and then swap it back when it's over.